1 I believe, based on the last scene of Telestina against the wall, that it is not a hole in the armor.  It is a very deep dent, and being in shadow, it was drawn with a dark center, but I do not believe it's actually a hole. There's blood on her face, but none in the dent, and it's vaguely purplish (armor color) on the inside. She's definitely got some cracked ribs, and if anything spalled on the inside, she may have metal fragments in her chest which could kill her -- but it's just as plausable that she lived. Since she's on-screen in closeup for less than two seconds, it's impossible to be sure.   (spoiler tag so it won't show in the sidebar)

2 I saw it the same way as Ubu... it looked like a impact crater (say from a coin moving at very high speeds) as opposed to a "throw a cat through it" hole.

Couldn't've felt good, either way.

3

That would be this picture:

I guess what you're saying is arguably true. If that had been a man, a dent that deep would have crushed the heart. But with boobs the size of Telestina's, there's probably more room inside that thing.

But I can't believe that armor could dent like that without breaking in the middle. Metal just doesn't act that way; metal hard enough to make decent armor isn't ductile.

4

A different point:

After what happened, there's no way that Mikoto wouldn't check Telestina after that battle to see if she were alive. And if she were, someone would be standing guard over her. She'd already popped up once after they thought they'd stopped her, and there's no way Mikoto would let that happen a second time.

If Mikoto was down watching Kiyama at the computer, it's because she was absolutely certain that Telestina wasn't getting back up again.

5

This is what real armor does:

...when hit by a cannonball. The metal doesn't stretch and balloon, it breaks and folds out of the way.

This cannonball was a lot wider than MIkoto's shot, but the principle is the same.

6 I'd say it goes beyond just sitting back and watching their Level 5s. After all, we know that the higher-ups running Academy City think, and possibly correctly, that one of the days to develop the talent of their most talented espers is to have them experience lethal combat. If Accelerator can possibly hit that next level by killing 20,000 underpowered Mikoto clones, how much stronger did the real Mikoto get, taking on Telestina that way?

That goes double if they've got evidence that Mikoto was sandbagging her tests. She's what, third-strongest in the city officially? If she's actually quite a bit stronger than that, does that make her the best candidate for hitting 6 first? (Hell, could Mikoto -take- Accelerator in a fair fight? They both have strong powers that are also quite versatile, so it might come down to who suffers the first failure of imagination. OTOH, Accelerator is portrayed as pretty smart - he can program by -directly interfering with electron flow-, which beats assembler for low-level language! By comparison, Mikoto's not a bimbo, but she's not the brains of the outfit.)

The question is... is Academy City's rather ugly at-any-cost mentality justified? It might be, actually. That certain world is not a nice place; it happens to be full of malevolent magical stuff, stuff that works on at least some kind of equivalent principle with Academy City's psychic power (else Touma couldn't neutralize both, right?) One of the (worse) stories in Index narrowly averted an apocalypse. If you're stuck in that kind of environment, you might indeed be desperate to create a means of defending yourself, and by extension, the rest of humanity...

7 You're over-thinking the armor.  I doubt the studio is going to model the physics and worry about metal properties, ductile or not.  And remember, we're theorizing that the actual shot may be plasma by the time it hits something, in which case, we're talking heat deformation instead of just impact damage (and why isn't Telestina getting her face cooked?)

As for guarding Telestina, well, they're junior high girls. They haven't got all the tactical acumen that we've amassed from watching years of movies where the bad guy just keeps refusing to die.

8 This is an "Engineer's Disease" post. Overthinking is de rigueur.

9

Anyway, what the studio is thinking is that they don't want to explicitly show the audience that Mikoto killed someone.

It's hard to believe that Mikoto and Kuroko got through that day without filling a few graves. Between spear carriers whose grenade launchers exploded in their faces, and the other group of spear carriers that Mikoto levelled with a huge electric arc, at least some of those guys have to be dead. But they were all faceless, and we don't see any blood. With Telestina we saw her laying there, covered with blood and unmoving, so they felt they needed to make clear to us that she was just pining for the fjords.

1

Spoiler tags, please!!!

If you're having formatting problems, either it means you're using a weird browser, or it means one of the critical java script files didn't load, or it means you're using a filter of some kind that is partially or wholly disabling javascript.

2

RenpyTom posted this without spoiler tags:

When Mikoto used her power while riding on top of Kiyama's car, why didn't it toast the electronic ignition? And Uiharu's computer, and everyone's cell phones, and...

It strikes me that someone, somewhere must be investing a lot of money in the whole Academy City project. Perhaps whoever's doing that feels obligated to make people whole after esper-related damage... and as part of that, they've decided it would be more cost-effective to supply people with robust electronics. It makes you wonder how they plan to profit from the powers. ... or maybe I'm just rationalizing.

(Also, for some reason my comment seems to be having its paragraphs eaten.)

3 Sorry about that, I had incorrectly assumed that the comments were below the fold. (They're not.)

Is the bbcode supposed to let me break things into paragraphs with blank lines, or is an explicit p tag required?

4

You should be able to hit Enter and get a paragraph break that way. Comment entry is supposed to be WYSIWYG.

You can operate at the level of HTML. The far right control on the comment entry header, looks like this "<>", opens a window where you can see and directly manipulate the HTML that the WYSIWYG code creates. But you shouldn't have to do that.

5 I'll check that out.

And my mind was going renpytom, renpytom, where do I know that name from?

I could have just clicked on the link, but that would be cheating, or something....

6 It is a stretch but:
Could the coin, car and Mikoto all be traveling in the same altered space and moving at the same relative speed? Coin flipping would be no problem then. Also, if altered reality/space is like the Tardis then the car and Mikoto could move some distance dissipating momentum without being seen to move from the outside

7

Actually, in the whole sequence, her hair and clothes don't seem to be moving the way they should in that kind of headwind. It's like she's created a bubble around her where the air is still.

But she shouldn't have that ability. The air isn't magnetic!

8

I just had another flash. When the first episode came out, one complaint (I think I heard it from Ubu) was that he didn't believe that Mikotto's railgun shot could make a car go flying that way. After all, it was only 1200 meters per second (or something like that).

Now, in the last episode, Telestina claims that her weapon is designed to be the same as Mikoto's railgun, but much stronger. Yet Mikoto is able to win against it. How?

I think the answer is that Mikoto has been holding back when doing the rating test at the school. She's capable of firing her shots a lot faster than she does at the swimming pool, so the official records about her power are way low. She used a lot more power than that against that car, and she probably came close to maxing out against Telestina, but it was enough to win.

9 That explanation works for me, but now I've got another "Whaaaaaaaat?" moment to deal with...  In the running battle on the freeway, Telestina drops back to avoid the railgun shot, and then cackles (groan) that she knows that Mikoto's range is only 50 meters.  Say what? If she's firing a physical object (the coin) it's not going to stop at that point -- in fact, the last railgun shot prior to the beam-o-war appears to span several city blocks!   Given the accuracy of her fire (as given in the first episode) she's not about to miss just because Telestina is now at 55m instead of 50.  Or is it not a matter of "miss," but "hit with enough force to penetrate?"

I think I postulated during the last discussion on this, that to obtain that accuracy with such a non-aerodynamic object as a spinning coin, she has to extend the field to guide it - and, I now believe, she is also "pushing" the coin for the entire length of the field.  I don't remember who postulated that she was also converting the coin to plasma, but that seems likely, given the light show.

Her range is 50m because that's as far as she can effectively push the plasma hard enough to penetrate something.  Up to that point, it's really the fact that she's ramming it through her target (think guided rocket, not ballistic bullet). Beyond 50m, it's just a lot of very hot plasma, traveling on momentum alone.  As such, it would still be a hazard, to unprotected flesh, but as I've noted before, the shot is much slower than a bullet, and subsonic.

Which implies that Touma is immune to the railgun shot after all; her guidance & thrust field would crash the moment it touched him, leaving the coin as nothing but hot gas few meters in front of Mikoto at best.

10 And now I'm having even more refrigerator moments. It's going to have to wait until tonight and is too long for comments here. 

11

Actually, it was me that proposed the idea that Mikoto vaporizes a coin to produce a stream of plasma as a conductor for her electrical energy. The claimed 50-meter range limit would be a combination of how much plasma she could produce from a coin, and how well she could control it.

I don't find such a limit to be implausible, if that's what she's really doing.

12 Of course, using plasma that way isn't the only attack mode she's got, and she genuinely has the ability to fire metallic objects as projectiles, as she proved on the freeway with that thing Kuroko fed her as ammunition.

13

On a different matter, I just watched the last episode again and noticed something in this frame:

This is just after Kuroko put a spike in the right manipulator of Telestina's powered suit, in order to make her drop the capsule. Kuroko is grinning because she succeeded. What I noticed is that she's got one spike remaining in her left hand.

I think she was keeping it as her last reserve. As long as Mikoto was up and fighting, Kuroko was content to let Onee-sama win the war. But if Mikoto had gone down, I think Kuroko was ready to kill Telestina with that last spike. That's in character.

It is not in character for her to run herself completely out of ammunition in a serious battle like this, and clearly she has not. I wouldn't be surprised if she has a few spikes left strapped to her thighs.

But it's completely in character for her to support Mikoto instead of winning it herself, even if she is capable of winning it herself.

Which brings up the second point: I think the writers are trying to imply that Telestina has gone totally wacko (duh), but also (and not duh) that she's become monomaniacally obsessed with Mikoto and with defeating Mikoto. That's why she's studied Mikoto's documented powers and levels and why her mech (and her powered suit) is designed to defeat Mikoto and why she seems to be hunting Mikoto all through this episode.

And the fact that Mikoto has been holding back in her school evaluations, and thus that her documented power levels are low, is why Mikoto is able to win. Telestina didn't overdesign enough. Mikoto is much stronger than Telestina realized.

So now we have at least a partial explanation for the beam-o-war: Telstina wanted to defeat Mikoto when Mikoto was using her top level attack, and to do so using an artificial version of that same attack. Mikoto was fighting, and it was a situation where only her top level attack could win, so that's what she used. And since Mikoto was up and fighting, Kuroko didn't interfere. She wanted to let Mikoto win it, and had faith that she would.

Which in turn means Kuroko is aware that Mikoto has been holding back in her school evaluations. She's seen Mikoto in action many times, so it's not too surprising she would be cognizant.

1 A pretty good end?  Maybe.  But they really ruined the series overall with ep. 15-20.  Not as bad as a certain 8 episode arc from another series we won't mention, but a complete squandering of opportunity.

2 Different people wanted different things from this show. Some wanted action and this sisters arc, others (included myself) wanted Kuroko yuri antics. In the end they pleased neither group..

3 I actually liked the episodes.  Granted I wasn't looking for any particular arc, or for anything to happen.  I just took them for what they were.

4 Ditto, DrH.  And by taking what they gave us, I've enjoyed Railgun all the way through.

5 (Uiharu's power was kinda lukewarm, though)

6 Was that revenge?

7 Wazzahuh?

8 I thought maybe you were retaliating for my pun with a pun of your own.

9 Oh.  I had that part of my brain cauterized, so I don't remember it anymore.

1 Huh, I've seen that underlying metaphysics in supers settings before.

So, technically, both paranormal powers and magic use the same energies/reality alteration/phlebotinum, the difference is the source.  Does this mean that the external beings/sources that magic users tap on are, essentially, vastly powerful paranormal power users?  Albeit probably ones of different species that predate humanity, most likely.

2

Here's part of what I posted as a comment at Ubu's:

I thought I might need to deal with the question of why Touma didn’t prevent the explosion entirely. I think there are two ways to retcon that.

The one I like better is this: Touma can’t run time backwards. When the edge of the explosion reaches him and he touches it, what’s already happened is permanent as far as he’s concerned. He can’t retroactively nullify it. But he can prevent it from continuing to spread past him and into the area behind him, and that’s what he does do.

So why doesn't the explosion stop everywhere when he finally touches it? The simple answer is that like every other psionic, Touma's power works the way he believes it will work, and he doesn't think he can do that. the reason for the parabolic unaffected-volume behind him is that it's what he expects his power to do.

As to the railgun attack, the entire path of the coin is the same as the explosion. Whether Mikoto is using electric fields on the coin or not, she is using her power to move it, in the sense that what it does after she thinks she’s ceasing to use electric fields is still the result of her imagination rendered physical by her power. So the coin would stop once it struck Touma’s right hand, and fall on the floor.

However, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I don’t think that Mikoto is really firing a projectile. What she’s doing is to vaporize the metal and use it to create a plasma channel for an electricity attack. So the channel would stop at the point where it touched his hand, and any electric arc passing down it wouldn’t connect to him and zorch him.

When Touma cancelled Mikoto’s iron-sand whip, he wasn’t doing so retroactively. He cancelled its existence going forward, and that works in terms of his power and his conception of what it can do. Cancelling an entire explosion, however, would require time paradoxes, so he doesn’t do that.

Now it's true that this means that Touma could be defeated by a magic user who was able to channel enough power against him. We presume that there's a tendency for reality to resist change, which is effectively a boost for Touma in the power comparison equation, but evidently it isn't all that much of a boost. But it hasn't happened because of the other distinctive thing about Touma: he's ridiculously strong. I believe he is level 6, which is kind of a no-upper-end category.

In Index he does face two foes that I believe were stronger than him, the alchemist and the angel. The good guys won in both of those cases, but Touma didn't beat them with his right hand.

And now some new thoughts: This business of "the psionic's power does what he thinks it will do" leads to some interesting consequences. top level power users like Mikoto actually do have multiple unrelated powers. Mikoto's ability to walk on walls, for example: she has that ability because she thinks it's a natural outgrowth of her basic control over electricity and magnetism. She can walk on a wall because she's magnetizing the metal rebar inside the wall.

But how does she know that there is rebar in there? Well, if she can walk on the wall, then it must have, right? ...even if it doesn't really. As long as she believes rebar is there, she can walk on that wall.

3 It also leads to some weird powers, like asphalt girl's....

I'm not sure I buy the "one person, one power" explanation.  People would have naturally developed multiple talents before some scientist figured out the rules (and got that one wrong.)  Of course, if he were a very authoritative wrong, he just might convince the world that's how it really works, which would cause it to actually work that way since people would believe him.

Hm.  Don't anybody let Al Gore get this power... I'm just sayin'....

4 I don't know, as with the example above, its not hard to BS an explanation linking two effects to the same power.  I could easily see individuals with two or more apparent powers being "explained" that way by the scientists.

Also, think about it, if you discovered you could, say, telekinetically move objects.  Would you try to run really fast, on the off chance you also have superspeed?  Or would you try seeing if you could fly, or create invisible barriers, or some other effect that would intuitively be related to telekinesis?  Even without the science, paranormal individuals would tend to have one power.  It just might grow more broad with time and practice, starting at "I can do one specific thing" and theoretically ending up at "I can do anything as long as I can work the word 'magnetic' into a sentence about it."

5 But if you want to continue on your theory, why then does that make Touma apparently incredibly unlucky. Does his view of what reality mean that he believes that reality sucks, and so the unluckiness is a manifestation of that view?

6 I don't think he is unlucky. He just bitches a lot.

7 I don't know, I'd argue manifesting a power that doesn't actually help one's normal life any, but makes you a target or a pawn for a wide variety of other people, might count as 'unlucky.'

A better question is "Why does any paranormal manifest the particular initial power they do, if its based on belief?"  I mean, not having see Index/Railgun, I can't say about it per se.  However, in almost every story or setting that uses this metaphysics for superpowers that I have seen. . . well, its pretty rare for them to *consistently* have a good explanation based on belief.

Sometimes you've got powers that reflect important aspects of a character's personality.  Sometimes you've got powers that reflect their wishes and desires.  Sometimes you've got powers that reflect their fears and nightmares.  Sometimes you've got powers that reflect a dire survival situation.  And some characters just get weird powers that don't make any sense.

8

Metaphysician, my retcon powers are great but I can't perform miracles. Not even the great Chizumatic can completely compensate for Japanese writers who don't care at all about consistency and logic.

I think that Crest/Banner of the Stars is the only science fiction series I've ever seen which is not vulnerable to the refrigerator effect.

9 Oh, I'm not complaining.  A 100% rigid and explained system does not a good superhuman story make, in my experience.  I was just saying that, comparatively speaking, that's the biggest elephant in the room.

Its probably for the best that the writer go with "sometimes things just turn out this way."  Trying to keep 100% to a deterministic model when dealing in belief based superpowers?  *Sooo* easy to accidentally turn your story dark and horrific. . .

10 Heh. Good point, like the suggestion I made last time that consistency would have been served by Kuroko succeeding in teleporting everything except Touma's right hand.

Regarding his luck, though, it's not just perception, as his father went to extreme measures to try and mitigate it.  Touma's in Academy City because his father thought they might find an explanation and solution.  Which, as Steven points out, they seem to have.

One thing is, I can't explain any of Touma's manifested abilities without assuming that his sub-conscious expression of his power is not the same as what he consciously thinks/states it is.  As I stipulate over on Bridgebunnies, I think he briefly realized how it works, but in the shock and confusion of the fight, and losing his arm (plus not having author meta-knowledge), he's not realized that he could "extend" the power through sheer hard work, as the Railgun did. To that extent, her constant attacks whenever she sees him have actually helped Touma strengthen his power

 Which is why, I think, Academy City has never hunted either of them down, despite the mass power failures that their battles have caused.  (That is, Alister Crowley is preventing it).  Given the reliability of the "powers database" used by Judgement and the Anti-skills (prior to the Level-Upper, anyway), there's no way they'd fail to figure out who is the cause of these power failures.

Not to mention the beginning of the first episode of Railgun, where her EMP nearly causes several accidents and knocks out traffic lights for several blocks. And in the first episode of Index, she knocks out power over a major part of the city for the next day. "Hey Uiharu, there were reports of a lightning storm on the bridge just before that power failure, but the sky was clear..  How many level 4+ electric-powered users do we have?" (Kuroko and Uiharu suddenly find the ceiling to be really interesting...)  It's clear that Kuro  

11 ANN now says Railgun is a 24 ep. series, but they don't have any titles after the 14th, just air dates.

12

I haven't watched it yet (just downloaded it) but from Aroduc's post it looks like ep 14 is about Saten trying out for membership in Anti-Skill. That doesn't seem like something they'd do for a series ender.

13 No, although we get to see the supervisor, and even Konoe-sempai again.  All the people we saw using Level Upper earlier got put into a special extra class. They think it's punishment, but it really seems geared to finding out if recollections of their formerly altered personal realities can be leveraged into permanently raising their power.  Several people do test higher, but no one gets a level increase.

Preview for ep. 15 indicates that the Sisters arc isn't starting next.

1 His last name may be minor supporting evidence for this theory: Morisato means "forest village".

-j

2 It was definitely a "headdesk" moment to read that theory: We only see her lover in grainy profile from behind, but the resemblance was unmistakable.  I immediately figured that Keichi was Morgan's target because he reminded her strongly of her lover, but that her overall goal was more abstract: the destruction of the Gate that separated her from him originally.  This significantly lessens her as character.  Your theory works much better. And yes, the attraction was otherwise masked by the trope. 

Of all the figures in the film, Morgan is far and away the most tragic; in fact I think she comes close to stealing the movie. Celestin made a good villain, and I give high marks to his plan; it was intelligent and kept the good guys on their heels. But it was Morgan's inner conflict that made her such a compelling character. 

3 Give Kawasumi Ayako a good character and she will steal the show. That's just how talented she is.

4 I added an entry to the WMG for AMG.

5 I find myself in agreement after seeing this movie. She's extremely talented and turned in a steller performance here.

Side note: in the party, the two girls all over Keichi are his sister Megumi and Hasegawa, the geeky one with the glasses. Both are staggeringly drunk, and Hasegawa provokes Bell's jelaousy storm by having a pity party and then trying to strip her top and show her breasts to Keichi.   At this point in the manga continuity, Hasegawa is the president of the club.  The only other two girls here are Chihiro, sitting to Hasegawa's left, and Morgan, sitting by the stair. (Side-side note: I did not get to attend enough parties like this in college.)

6

I'll be damned. It's been a couple of years since I last watched the movie, and I sure didn't remember that one of the drunk girls was Megumi.

But you're right. It is her (on the left).

7 Gah. Well, I'll consider surprising you with that as my payback for the last two hours. I failed my saving throw vs. the TV Tropes site again....

8

Well, I just lost (or well spent) two hours, too. Since I had the disk in my drive to get that frame capture, I ended up watching the movie again.

Turns out my memory is a bit faulty. I could have sworn that when Morgan's lover was shown that he was wearing green, but I was wrong. And there were other details I got wrong.

I also remembered the visuals as being better than they really were. This was shown in theaters, but I'm no longer so sure it would really look all that much better in high res.

9

"I could have sworn that when Morgan's lover was shown that he was wearing green, but I was wrong." 

No, you're right. Their colors are severely muted by the effect used to show that this is a memory or a recording. However, in one scene where Morgan's holding her lover's hand, it's clear that the underlying color of his sleeve cuff is dark green.

1 Possible answer:  He needed to bring the spaceship home so that people without instant transmission could use it.  Also, if he just abandoned it, even if Bulma could work hard to replace it, she might not want to if he just wants to use it to go off and find someone new to learn from.  Only problem with the second explanation is that long term planning like that is a bit out of character for Goku.  I don't know if he knew that he would be needed back home quickly.  

2

They already had a working space ship. It's the one Vegeta stole and eventually returned in. They didn't need the one Goku brought back, and in fact they never use any space ship for anything for the rest of the series.

The only time they ever need to visit other places, they use teleportation. E.g. Goku uses his instant transmission to visit new Namek in order to recruit Dende to become the new Kami. Or Kibito using his teleportation ability to move various people to the planet of the Kai's at various times.

They do use a spaceship in one of the later movies, but it's the one Vegeta stole.

3 My understanding is that the weakness of Instant Transmission is that it only travels to a known location or person. If Goku wants to travel to say, Vulcan, where he has never been and he doesn't know anyone there, he needs a ship.

If it were me, and Goku teleported home without the ship, and I had no reason to suspect he'd be needed quickly, I'd ask him to return and bring the ship back, or at least taxi a pilot over to do it instead. Two ships mean that one can be used for technology development while the other is in service, or that one can be ready to fly while the other is in the shop or being used elsewhere. With space travel being as easy as it is shown, I would imagine that something must have happened with the technology, but off screen because it isn't that kind of series. (If I were a character in dragonball and involved with the situation, I wouldn't know about Freeza or that there wouldn't be anymore space travel in the series.)

Still, when I overthink it that much, I conclude that Goku's time is too valuable to have him performing technical work for the period of time needed to get the thing back. Would the salary of a couple of Capsule Corp. guys be enough cheaper than making the ship in the first place to cover the deprecation of the ship? (I assume this is the ship Bulma's dad built after reverse engineering Goku's drop pod.)

Of course, maybe the parking fees on Yardrat are killer.

4 *cough*  I've always taken it on faith, that DBZ is one of the worst series to actually give any thought to. . .

5 I have a condition that causes me to massively over think things.  Dragonball at leasts holds together for me when I shake it mentally.  DeathNote did not.  Maybe it isn't written to Tom Kratman standards, but Tom is not the set of all legitimate fiction.

6

If Goku wants to travel to say, Vulcan, where he has never been and he doesn't know anyone there, he needs a ship.

Nope. Afraid not.

He needed to reach new Namek in order to recruit a new Kami who could create dragonballs. He went to North Kai, to find out the general direction. The Kai showed him about where the planet was, and Goku was then able to detect Namekian ki from that location, even though he didn't personally know any of the Nameks.

So he'd never been there and didn't know any of them, but reached the place through Instant Transmission anyway.

He targets ki, but it doesn't have to be the ki of someone he knows. It just has to be ki that he can sense.

7 MetaP, that's why this post is in the "Engineer's Disease" category.

1 Dunno if it holds together. He's got middle school friends, and even if you can argue that they're just around to provide additional warm bodies when Haruhi needs them, that implies that he's been around and has some past history with them. Existentialism only takes you so far - if Haruhi's completely rewritten the world such that Kyon always existed, well, how would you know?

I figure "Kyon" sounds like "John" and that's close enough. Maybe the author has a funny joke in mind that's ruined if his last name gets out or something like that.

So how do we explain the lack of focus on Kyon's domestic arrangements? Probably because they're just not interesting. We don't have any idea where Mikuru lives. We don't have any idea where Koizumi lives. We only know about Yuki's digs because they're actually interesting, in kind of a "reinforce just how weird Yuki is" way.

Most importantly, if Kyon's existence is entirely due to Haruhi's power, then book 4 would make no sense. ;p

I'm absolutely willing to entertain the notion that Kyon was "recruited" by Haruhi because he's everything she wants in a man (and none of the other stuff). But I don't think we can conclude that she actually summoned him into existence...

2

Well, what do novels say? Tappan writes in his "spoiler notes" (not spoiling in this case):

Question: During the First Conversation, Why Does Haruhi Ask Kyon if They Have Met Before?

This is answered in Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody, which will probably be included if there is a second season of the anime.

This implies explanations.

3

Avatar, Kyon was created as part of the data storm that took place three years prior to the events of the anime series.

That was before his years in middle school. (That's also when Koizumi was changed.)

4 We never find out Kyon's name, and the reason is that he doesn't have one.

Yes, but he knows his real name.  I don't remember the episode (I think it was ep01, as opposed to the movie), he says that "Kyon" is his nickname.  If he knows it's a nickname, that implies that he knows he has a real name as well.

(wikipedia's page on him says that in the 9th book, his name is hinted at: his real name is hinted in a conversation between him and Sasaki; a girl who had known Kyon since middle school, saying it was a very majestic name that didn't seem to fit him.)

Take that for what it's worth.

5 It was in the first year of the middle school, as Taniguchi explained. They were together in school as her antics became progressively more bizarre until the rapture three years ago (which should place the timing about a week into the middle school, which in Japan continues for 3 years). So, the progression that Taniguchi related occured when they were in elementary, or the storm happened somewhat less than 36 months before the conversation, and they just say "3 years ago" for simplicity.

All of this fails to explain just why Haruhi created Kyon in the different school from her own, or what name is written in school journal and other documentation.

6 I've read some odd fan fiction over the years. Two of them, one of which does not actually include Haruhi material in its canon, state that Haruhi is to Kyon as Azathoth is to Nyarlathotep.

7

Pete, you're no fun.

I'm not claiming this is a finished, complete theory, and I'm SURE as hell not claiming that this is what the author is thinking, OK? I'm just having fun with ideas.

8 I'm REALLY not comfortable sourcing Kyon as the effect for an event for which he was also, arguably, the cause. Closed circular time loops are scary!

Also, if Haruhi's power created Kyon three years ago, why was it three years until they ran into each other? Haruhi's subconscious is not known for its patience.